Character and Narrative - Time/Budget Restraints & Limited Animation

30 seconds at 24 frames per second = 720 frames (or 360 on twos), a scary proposition for someone deciding to do traditional animation, especially if you don't like drawing digitally. I decided to use "limited animation" a time and money saving technique used throughout the history of traditionally drawn animation. Limited animation is the term used to describe a form of animation which reuses as many assets as possible, which became possible when animators began using transparent mediums such as celluloid or acetate to create frames which could be layered on top of each other and photographed all at once. The first major change this brought about was that the animators no longer had to draw the background in every single frame. One single background could be photographed below all the animated frames. When Winsor McCay animated Gertie the Dinosaur in 1914 the background was drawn anew in every single frame, compare this to his film The Sinking of the Lusitania produced four years later, which made use of layers of transparent cels layered above oil painted backgrounds.
Thanks to these new technologies it also became possible to animate individual characters separately, again allowing frames to be reused when certain characters weren't moving within a scene. This was later increased to using separate cels for separate moving parts on the same character, a good example of this being the Beatle's Yellow Submarine movie, in which many scenes are entirely static other than a single arm movement or a foot tapping to the music. In fact it was thought by King Features who produced the film that the film would have been impossible to make had they not used such limited animation (at the time of production no studio other than Disney had been able to produce a feature length animation without going bankrupt in the process).
These days with digital production techniques it is very easy to animate separate parts of a scene individually, and in my own production for Telling Tales I used Photoshop to repeat frames throughout the film.
The main issue I see with limited animation is a very flat and lifeless look in scenes in which there is little movement. Some easy tricks to make things look less dull are making static background characters blink every now and then, or producing line boil. "Boiling Line" means a wobbly look applied to outlines, normally by repeating a two or three frame loop which gives the illusion of movement. There are some plugins available for programs like Flash and After Effects which apply line boil to digital animation, but in my production I drew two frames for every still image to keep my character looking alive, and make the car look like it was being vibrated by its engine.